What is it about?
Different speech styles have their own tunes. The tune of a certain speech style provides us with preliminary hints of labeling a speech style before the concrete content is recognized. This paper reports the first empirical study of the tunes of different speech styles; namely, opera speaking versus opera singing, opera speaking versus normal speaking, and normal speaking versus normal singing. In all these speech styles, Cantonese lexical tones are well preserved. The data analyses show that speaking and singing differ mainly in pitch slope. Speaking styles are associated with a declining intonation, while singing styles show a slightly ascending tendency. The acoustic data also indicate that a higher pitch register is usually employed when a speech type is considered more conspicuous, such as opera speaking (compared with normal speaking) and normal singing (compared with normal speaking).
Why is it important?
The present study explores the interaction of lexical tones and speech tunes. It is the first to propose that the declining intonation in speaking influence pitch movement at two levels -- not only the utterance level, but also the syllable level. It is also the first empirical study to identify the tunes of opera speech and singing speech, which are also important speech styles but have been neglected in linguistic research.